261–270 of 392 posts
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> (Spoiler) It doesn't work Citation needed.
Actually, it is the SV crowd who needs to prove it is possible. :-)
That still doesn’t prove your original statement.
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If you’re transacting with a bunch of people that you do not trust then the payment rails are the least of your problems. Your comment just feels like typical crypto-booster vague handwaving to me - can you give an actual example of such a situation where the existing third parties that alreayd exist to solve these kind of problems cannot be used? Be concrete.
I always thought the grocery supply chain was a good example use case. Multiple parties (seed origin, farmer, fertilizer manufacturer and/or dispenser, pesticide manufacturer and/or crop duster, harvester, transporter(s), grocery association, grocer) who all handle any given tomato, all with incentive and opportunity to lie to some other members along the chain, but not to their immediate neighbors. Plus, even who th…
The flaw is that there is never any way to actually tie the real world to the Blockchain. It's literally impossible. You can have all the fancy mathematically proven Blockchain records you like, but it's just impossible to tie that to an actual tomato or actual pesticide.
We have track and trace system already for crops and they have the same problem: all the paperwork in the world can't prevent someone from, say, weighing a box of tissues instead of the box of cigars you intend to sell. In the end you need to trust someone.
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The problem with the article is that there are no real arguments besides citing other articles. At best, it’s a summary of Bruce Schneier’s works with a catchy headline. I’m not a blockchain die-hard, but there are some solid practical uses. For instance, in trade finance where multiple parties in an environment with limited trust have to settle a complex transaction asynchronously, blockchain / DLT can really help.…
> For instance, in trade finance where multiple parties in an environment with limited trust have to settle a complex transaction asynchronously, blockchain / DLT can really help. When does that happen?
Banks act as facilitators of such as transaction on import / export side, often have to interact with shipping / logistics and insurance providers to ascertain that goods have been sent in order to clear and settle payment from buyer to seller. It’s an entirely event-driven and very paper-based business with lots of complex processing logic which can very well be replaced by a smart contract, especially because each party may not trust each other a lot (eg exporter wishing to audit transactions of the importer’s bank). A blockchain works quite well for this type of problem.
Disclaimer: I do not work for Corda.
I see this argument against crypto a lot. It's valid, but it's also missing a very very important point. With crypto, practically, you still have to trust external entities. However, you can choose who you trust. You can choose to trust entities far beyond the reach of your corrupt local government, or you can choose which financial institutions you entrust. You can distribute your trust among multiple entities. You're in control.
This isn't the case with the traditional financial system where you're pretty much forced into trusting a specific pre-selected set of options that are all substantially identical.
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As explained in the text: the point isn't that these problems aren't solved by blockchain, they're amplified. E.g.: scams existed without blockchain, but now they're forever and permanently engraved into the blockchain. Code was always flawed, but now a bug isn't just a bug, it's a bug in a smart contract with potentially disastrous consequences that can never be properly fixed.
This is almost a political argument. Because it's the same argument about free speech. In the end, you either believe in the individual's choice, and individuals will do really stupid and bad stuff, and they will also fall for scams, but do you give the individual freedom of choice to fall for scams and speak freely? This is a high risk option, perhaps. But it is also likely to be most effective at delivering progres…
It has happened in places with just enough freedom. The Wild West wasn't exactly known for its great pace of technological innovation. On the other hand, China today is a major innovator (e.g. in solar tech), and it is a much less free country than, say, Indonesia, which is not nearly as innovative.
In particular, legislation and enforcement against fraud are extremely necessary for a functioning system. Fraud directly keeps resources away from innovators (since people who thought they were investing into/buying an innovative solution are giving money to a fraudster instead); and it also indirectly dis-incentivizes belief in innovation, as someone who has been burned by a fraudster will be less inclined to believe the next innovator.
It amazes me how polarizing blockchain and cryptocurrency is. It is to black/white, love/hate. I really don't ever remember a technology that has created such a visceral reaction from people. I personally, believe there is a quite novel concept behind the trust-less consensus mechanisms. It amazes me that computers can come to an agreement in a hostile environment--fully decentralized. How that is put to use in pract…
I’ll bite. My friends and I were into bitcoin in mid-2009. We mined some coins on our 8800 GT. At the time, I read the papers and the wiki and understood that the technology will not scale so greatly, in a way it wasn’t even designed to; it felt like an interesting proof of concept, the ability to actually buy things with bitcoins felt largely like a novelty, I remember buying a coffee in Prague a few years later for…
> When alls said and done, the initial promise isn’t even kept, there’s very few “super miners” who if they worked together would be able to control the entire bitcoin economy, which is the situation with central banks.
> You can see exactly what I mean when you look at Monero. Objectively Monero solves the problems with bitcoin, but because it’s very difficult to trade with (due to it being privacy focused and no exchange willing to trade it) the price is very stable, since it can’t easily be used for money laundering or scams due to it’s higher barrier to entry.
The author doesn't understand the value of distributed censorship resistant consensus that's secured by energy. Also the author fails to consider the situation of 80% of humanity who live in countries that experience hyperinflation frequently. https://bitcoinmagazine.com/culture/check-your-financial-pri...
I don't think Bitcoin is a global solution for hyperinflation. It just makes it worse. If the value of your money doesn't fluctuate with your, net exports, you'd better have a very cheap industrial apparel.
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Yep. That would be the legacy (predatory, inflationary) financial system.
As opposed to Bitcoin, whose money supply grows with over 1.7% a year currently, giving miners around $50m a day to burn coal with.
An umlimited supply of currency like that underpinning our current financial system is hugely predatory and benefits only those in power and those closest to them.
Fiat incentivises huge environemntal destruction, you can just print more money and allocate it to those closest to you, who are inventivised to spend it as quickly as possible because it is always losing value. This encourages short term thinking and quick turnarounds, which results in mass produced crap that is horrible for the environment, or long drawn out wars that are even worse for it. At the bottom of the pyramid, rampant consumerism is caused by this same reason.
A rational, limited digital currency is a miracle. It will incentivise the opposite. Because you can't just "print more" and watch its value halve over your lifetime, you'll be much more careful in how it is spent. Look at how many shoddy products there are now, and how much consumer habits have changed since currencies moved off the gold standard. I loathe having my finances tied up in such a mess. We have a chance to right this wrong with all the benefits of an open and distributed system. That's the promise of BTC.
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Why would you need to involve a smart contract to buy coffee?
Coffee is just an extreme example. The actual example I usually go for is selling/buying an apartment. I'm currently in Sweden, and I've gone through the process twice now. The contracts were several pages if clear text that even I, with my rudimentary knowledge of Swedish could understand. Good luck checking that everything is correct with a "smart contract" version.
So where do smart contracts come in? Who would want to use a smart contract to buy an apartment? Unless possible the apartment deed was stored on the blockchain or something, but that is highly unlikely. Real estate is a very poor fit, since it's very heavily regulated in numerous ways. It's not just about ownership, and anonymous ownership of real estate is definitely a non-goal. It's an anti-goal.